Alice Team Roundtable at Java.net's Community Corner 2009

Several members of the Alice team spoke at java.net's Community Corner Tuesday afternoon. Alice is an educational tool that teaches programming concepts. Its origins were in the early 1990s. Development was picked up by Carnegie Mellon University in the late 1990s. Today, Alice is used by universities and high schools to introduce students to the type of thinking and logical structures that are required for programming.

The programs you create using Alice are visual scripts, little cartoon movies. There are objects such as people, rabbits, penguins; and there are fundamental actions, equivalent to the methods that can be enacted by an object. For example, a bunny can hop.

The Alice program editor is a GUI that lets you select objects, apply methods (make the objects do things). There are loops, if/else conditionals, etc. Furthermore, you can create your own callable methods, by combining fundamental actions. For example, you could create a hop-scratch-sniff method, by creating a name for the action and writing a script the tells the bunny to hop, then scratch, then sniff. This method could be called within loops, etc.

Alice 3 is currently nearing beta. One of the new features in Alice 3 is implementation of the concept of classes. In Alice 2, if you create a custom method, it applies only to a specific object. For example, if you created a hop-scratch-sniff action for Jeff the bunny, only Jeff would "know" how to perform that action. In Alice 3, you'll create custom actions for bunnies, not just for a specific bunny. So, in Alice 3, all bunnies (not just Jeff) will be able to perform your custom hop-scratch-sniff action. I believe incorporating teaching the concept of inheritance is also being worked on by the Alice team.

Another nice feature: you can import an Alice "program" into NetBeans, and then convert the program into actual Java code. The Java can be edited, then run as an Alice application, with standard Alice visualization, etc.

Alice is free software. Visit Alice.org to download the software and documentation.

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